A taste of Swadeshi: Rediscovering the foods rooted in India’s freedom movement

CHENNAI: Before food became something to photograph, review or rediscover as a “superfood”, it was simply what came from the land around us. Rice, millets, vegetables, salt and other local produce travelled from fields to kitchens, carrying with them not just nourishment, but generations of knowledge.

During India's freedom struggle, what people bought and consumed could also become a political choice. The Swadeshi movement, which gathered momentum after the 1905 Partition of Bengal, called for the boycott of foreign goods and the use of Indian-made products as a way of strengthening indigenous production and economic self-reliance.

“Food was never just nourishment during India's freedom struggle. It was also a statement of self-reliance,” says food writer and researcher Rakesh Raghunathan. For him, the Swadeshi idea encouraged Indians to value local produce and traditional foods over imported goods. Salt, he points out, became one of the most powerful examples of an everyday ingredient acquiring the meaning of resistance.

But the story of indigenous food stretches much further back than the freedom movement itself. Millets such as ragi, bajra and jowar were everyday foods long before they acquired the contemporary label of “superfoods”. Chef Arupam Baidya points to the traditional knowledge embedded in these grains and in the practices through which communities preserved seeds and passed agricultural knowledge from one generation to the next. At Parva, Baidya works with ingredients and dishes that reflect that regional diversity, including millet rotis and Chakhao, the black rice from Manipur. His idea of Swadeshi today is not about a single Indian cuisine, but the many cuisines that make up the country. His memories extend to lesser-known regional foods too: Putu, a wild mushroom from Sarguja; Ningro, the tender shoot of a fern eaten in Sikkim with Churpi; and Nakima, a bitter wild flower. For Baidya, these foods are reminders of how much regional knowledge remains undiscovered.